Category: Migration

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Upgrading Amazon Linux – WHOA, what a journey!

[NOTE: It’s been over 6 months since I’ve posted, so I’m going to abbreviate this and continue later.]

Wow, what a path. This might be a LONG one, so sit back, pour a cup of covefe and read on.

I was trying to run something on my Amazon Linux instance but it wouldn’t update because the version of the OS is out of date. I did manage to run yum update and on my next login I saw this:

Warning from Amazon
Whoa – not what I expected

I had never seen this before. It also made me realize I have to upgrade or maybe just bring this site down.

Eventually I just figured “Oh well, time to upgrade” and spun up a new Amazon Linux 2023 instance and upgraded MySQL and PHP to the latest versions. Then I unpacked my WordPress instance, restored the database to a new one in MySQL and thought it would be a nice night, reading my lame site in all the updated glory. But of course, it all failed. My WordPress version was so out of date that it wouldn’t run on the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. What’s worse, I couldn’t upgrade the versions on my Amazon Linux instance as IT was so out of date that I couldn’t get even remotely current versions of MySQL and PHP. Oh bother…

Migrating the database to MySQL isn’t that hard – there aren’t any real routines in the stock WP database that requires a high version of MySQL. Porting the database over to a newer version of MySQL worked pretty easily. The problem was PHP (naturally).

To sum it up, running my current version of WordPress failed on the latest version of PHP (8.X). After going back several times and uttering many four letter words and curses, I decided to upgrade to Amazon Linux 2 and use all of the current versions on that platform. Further, since AL 2 was still current (at the time), this gave me time to figure out what I wanted to do.

Voila! AL 2 had PHP 7.X and it worked. Now I had some lead time. Regrettably, time has gotten away from me and it’s now October. AL 2 is now reached its EOL and I have to migrate to AL 2023 and port over everything all over again.

But before I work on that, let me get caught up on my C64 set up since I haven’t updated anything on that front in a while, either. My poor C64 is just collecting dust in the garage…


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Back after successful migration from AWS RDS to a local database

Okay, now that I’ve made a major change to this website, I’m back on and will keep this site up! I set this site up as part of my Amazon Web Services (AWS) training. A site like this uses a database to store its information, and mine was using Amazon’s wonderful RDS (relational database service) for my database.  RDS has a number of great features; the database is always running, it’s scalable and Amazon does all of the maintenance.

The catch? Cost. Even with the cheapest plan I was paying about $25 a month for the database alone. That’s just too much for a low volume website!

So I came up with a plan: run the database on the same server. It’s not as cool or as flashy, but it will save money which is my ultimate goal. Plus I’ll have to migrate from RDS to a .sql file, how hard could it be, right?

Looking up entries on the web, it turns out there are lots of tutorials on how to do just the opposite: migrate SQL to RDS. This required a lot of digging around. I was hoping for a nice, step-by-step, oral tradition via screenshot guide that would hold my hand through the process. Fortunately, I found something on docs.aws.amazon.com that really fit the bill. Turns out you can run mysqldump on your RDS instance and it will do the job just as if you’re running it on a normal MySQL instance. Viva la cloud-ia!

(Just do you don’t have to rip your hair out like Bender, here is the resource I found.)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/MySQL.Procedural.Exporting.NonRDSRepl.html

So I ran mysqldump using my RDS instance ID, database root password and it worked like a charm!